Here's my old, tired 1990 Mazda Miata mx5 seats. The driver's side one on the right is pretty faded. But worse, a previous owner has done the popular "foamectory" to make the seating position lower to the floorboards. However, this destroys the ergonomics of the seat. So until I can find a nice replacement (getting a lot harder tor the 30 year old car) I thought I'd reverse the foamectomy and fix both seats up in the process.
From the underside, you can see the results of the foamectomy. The process is pretty simply: cut out the bit of foam on the very bottom of the seat cushion.
What was cut out needs to be replaced. But instead of taking the seat all apart, I opted for an easier approach.
I filled it with poly fill from an old couch pillow...
...and then I screwed on a little bit of sheet metal to hold it all in, replacing what I cut out a few steps ago.
It worked so well that I also added some to the lumbar support area.
Which was easy to do because to open it up, all I had to do was remove the hog rings from behind the seat and then pull the cushion out from the front side. To re-assemble, I used zip ties instead of hog rings, way way easier.
Time for a good cleaning with my wife's carpet shampooing vacuum cleaner.
The machine captured three decades of farts.
After it dried, I peeled back the top zipper fold to show how much it was faded.
I sprayed them with black fabric and interior paint from duplicolor, the stuff works pretty damn well. But the camera can still pick up differences in the shades of black between the two seats that faded unequally.
I also wanted to raise the seats even further above the floorboards, for my custom project car. Not many typical miata owner will do this, but this is not a typical miata.
Thankfully this was pretty easy. I just welded on some metal tube onto the frame rails to act as spacers, and replaced the OEM hardware with longer bolts.
I added 1" in the front and 1.5" in the rear. I didn't want to add to much to the front so that my knees wouldn't hit the steering wheel.
You can see how the seat on the right is a little taller than the one on the left. I took this pic after doing this opperation to the passenger side seat but not the drivers side yet.
Dog tax!
